My first computer was an Apple //c. 1985. I spent a lot of time on that computer. A lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.

Fog, in case you hadn’t heard of it, is a fantastic cloud computing library written in Ruby. It provides a unified interface to several popular cloud computing platforms, making it easy to use them in Ruby. It’s also modular, and support for new services can be added easily. It currently supports four types of cloud services: storage, compute, DNS, and CDN.

This morning I was looking for a way to handle incoming email in a web application (similar to the way Highrise and Evernote let you email things to a special email address and have them put into their system).

Here’s what I found.

A sampling of the cool things I found this week. Emacs, PostgreSQL, Tea, and more.

The new and shiny links I’ve found this week. CSS, cloud computing, Emacs, and more.

When budgets get tight, it can be difficult to provide adequate training for your staff. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found some ways to provide some training even in the face of a shrinking (or non-existent) budget.

Inspired by Mike Gunderloy’s recent blog post, I decided to put together a list of the tools I use, both hardware and software.

Ruby makes it dead simple to generate representative test data.

I’ve found a few greatl tools lately for doing development with Ruby and Rails.

We are headed toward a time where the workings of government are much more visible to the American public.

The emergence of open, non-partisan APIs that provide access to information about how the government is operating is a massive step in the right direction. It will, I hope, bring forth a new wave of websites that mine the data that these web services provide, and expose it to the world. Voting records, government expenditures, bids, and bill details all need to be made available for anyo